“Since 2014, artist Tai Shani, a nominee for the 2019 Turner Prize, has constructed hallucinatory environments inhabited by feminine characters adapted from myth, history, and science fiction. This multipart project—encompassing sculpture, graphic images, installations, film, and performance—has taken several forms, one of them culminating in her first book, Our Fatal Magic. Each of the volume’s twelve chapters is an elliptical, phantasmagoric monologue delivered by one of Shani’s figures: a medieval mystic, a cube of flesh embodying the fairy-tale Bluebeard’s multiple murdered wives, even an AI program named after Mnemosyne, the Greek goddess of memory. Several of Shani’s projects have been presented under the rubric “Dark Continent” (or “DC”), a reference to Freud’s infamous description of female sexual psychology—a characterization shaped by the colonial geographic imagination. The setting of Our Fatal Magic is the land of Semiramis, named for the legendary Assyrian queen. Though she does not make an appearance in any of the chapters of Shani’s book, Semiramis is the cornerstone in Christine de Pizan’s The Book of the City of Ladies, a fifteenth-century allegory about the contributions of women to human society, which treats its heroines as the structural elements of a new city. The opening Note of Our Fatal Magic refers to the compilation’s source project, “DC: Semiramis,” as an “expanded adaptation” of de Pizan’s book.”  –-Artnews